Monday, September 1, 2014

Blinded By (Pseudo) Science

The rapid scientific advances of
the 1800’s made contemporary authors leery of the clever but arrogant men who
would crown themselves emperor or even play God. Mary Shelly, Jules Verne, Robert Louis
Stevenson and H.G. Wells told tales of hubris, of men who would bend mankind to
their wills by their command of nature.

In the Twentieth Century, scientific
monstrosities leapt out of the pages of fiction and into real life. The pseudo science of eugenics lent a veneer
of intellectual credibility to the inhumane experiments and racist
exterminations of the Third Reich.
“Scientific” Marxism justified the murder of hundreds of millions in
pursuit of a utopian workers paradise.
During the Cold War, the planet was brought to the brink of extinction
by the delusion that fighting a “winnable” nuclear war was possible.

In today’s secularist world, scientific
elites are elevated to the station of a new priesthood; arbiters of objective,
unvarnished truth; beyond the pale of petty corruptions and political intrigue. But scientists are people too.

Seduced by the allure of riches,
the glamour of celebrity and the hunger for power, climate science has sold its
soul. With the golden ring of controlling
the global social and industrial agenda within their grasp, many climatologists
have swapped scientific objectivity for political spin. In doing so, they become caricatures mad
sci-fi geniuses.

Like sci-fi fiction come to life, climatologists gone wild are frightening the children. In a
story entitled, “Youth anxiety on the
rise amid changing climate”, reporter Gayle MacDonald reports that, “Child
psychiatrists, psychologists and educators say they’ve seen an escalation in
the anxiety levels of today’s youth, who are constantly exposed to doomsday
talk about the destruction of our planet.”

What
these climate alarmists are doing to the kids is nothing short of child abuse. They are bludgeoning their fragile psyches
with trumped up and falsified data. On
Mises.org, Randall Holcombe, references a report in the American
Journal of Agricultural Economics. Holcombe
quotes from journal article:

“It
appears that news media and some pro-environmental organizations have the
tendency to accentuate or even exaggerate the damage caused by climate change.
… We find that the information manipulation… induces more countries to
participate in an IEA [International Environmental Agreement], which will
eventually enhance global welfare.

Linking
climate change to extreme weather may be a powerful way to motivate people.

The
IPCC has tended to over-generalize its research results and accentuate the
negative side of climate change. Following its lead, the mainstream media has
gone even further

…it may
be better for the countries to hold a pessimistic view of the climate problem,
as it will induce more countries to participate in the IEA…”

That’s
propaganda and proselytizing, not science.
The skewing of the climate story is exposed in detail in The Deliberate Corruption of Climate
Science by Tim
Ball, PhD. Ball
“argues, with overwhelming evidence, that in fact the global warming debate in
the halls of science has been an unmitigated fraud perpetrated by people who no
longer have the right to be called scientists. Their collective goals have been
to alter society radically while enriching themselves”.

“The United States is not at
great risk from climate change. The Obama administration’s Interagency Working
Group tasked with establishing the social cost of carbon (SCC) determined that
the SCC for the United States was only a few dollars per ton of carbon dioxide
emitted—and that was calculated usingoverheated climate models. Taking into
account new research that finds that the earth’s climate is less sensitive to
greenhouse gas emissions, and the humongous body of literature demonstrating
that enhanced carbon dioxide levels raise crop yields, the “social cost of
carbon” in the United States becomes close to zero (or perhaps even negative,
i.e., carbon emissions may actually provide a net benefit to the economy).”

And that’s the
real story. The war on climate change is
just one more is a series of “wars” that enable

statists to curtail liberty and
pick our pockets. Besides the endless
and pointless shooting wars that America has waged for the past century we have
also endured wars on poverty, women, drugs and terrorism. Each opens the
floodgates to new and innovative State controls over the lives of everyday
citizens and makes us poorer.

The climate
change sham covers government wealth transfers to “green” businesses such as
Solyndra and rationalizes crony capitalist scams like “Cash for Clunkers”. It nearly made a billionaire of the aforementioned
Al Gore who’s Chicago Climate Exchange would have held every American enterprise
hostage had Cap And Trade carried the day.
On that note, I am gratified to report that Australia recently closed down its national carbon
exchange this summer.

Sadly, the
losers in all of this were the nerdy guys, the scientific geeks who got led
astray by slick talking politicos and well heeled financiers. “Stick with us”, they said. “We’ll lie and you swear to it and we’ll be
laughing on the way to the bank.” Like
sheep led to wolves the brainiacs never stood a chance. They come off as puppets in some wild Lex Luthor scheme. Like Bozos
stuck in Antarctic ice.